deleted by creator
deleted by creator
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10796117
Fossify Gallery (fork of Simple Gallery), Fossify File Manager (fork of Simple File Manager) and Fossify Calendar (fork of Simple Calendar) are now available for download on F-Droid.
(Simple Mobile Tools suite was acquired by an Israeli adware company)
About Fossify: Fossify is all about community-backed, open-source, and ad-free mobile apps. A fork of the SimpleMobileTools, which is no longer maintained, and we're here to continue the legacy, bringing simple and private tech to everyone.
A few weeks ago, I was reinstalling my phone and stumbled across Fossify Gallery while looking for Simple Gallery Pro. I assumed they were a shady copycat because their app listing (on F-Droid) makes no mention of Simple Mobile Tools, yet it appears to be a fork. Consequently, I avoided it because it seemed shady. Turns out, SMT was bought.
I would have trusted this a lot more easily if the f-droid listing made it clear what is going on here. Maybe the (contributor to SMT) Dev who forked to Fossify was trying to avoid legal entanglements or something, but it made Fossify seem sketchy if you dont know the backstory, which I had no way of knowing.
Anyway, here is the corrected link to Fossify's github: https://github.com/FossifyOrg
24tl;dr - "bad blood". The SMT developer (one guy, "Tools") sold it to ZipoApps who immediately injected ads into the Play Store versions of all the tools and invented a name "Simple Mobile Tool" (note no "s") which angered a lot of people. There were blogs and news articles and discussions, you just missed them which happens - it's a period of transition in a difficult time.
Having participated lightly in the Github conversations, the community members who forked it took a lot of care to choose a new name (held several polls, etc.) and carefully constructed their presence in a positive manner without throwing any shade at the original developer or adware company who he sold it all to - they chose to take the noble route and just present their work without any vitriol or nastiness. They released Gallery first awhile ago, these are new updates and more apps being added - I saw changelog notes where they're removing license-encumbered libraries and stuff like that which somehow flew under the radar on F-Droid.
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I'm not sure why companies constantly try to buy up open source software. It's already open source. If they want to develop on top of it, in most cases they already can. They're not going to win any points with the open source community. The project will just be immediately forked and people will use the new FOSS version.
10except the current user base, that doesn't care about FOSS as you or I do, will continue using the original app which will net them a non-insignificant amount of ad revenue, which is their entire purpose for existing. Makes sense to me
16Because there is no way that adding adware in a FOSS version of any software has any chance of success.
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I did miss it, downloading now, thanks.
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